


the midnight view before the dawn

by VictoriaG16



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 16:25:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1394332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VictoriaG16/pseuds/VictoriaG16
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>B'elanna returns to an old, almost forgotten place on the holodeck, and Janeway joins her. Early season one, a few weeks after "Parallax".</p>
            </blockquote>





	the midnight view before the dawn

**Author's Note:**

> i started writing this a while ago and then came back to it a few days ago and presto, you have halfway decent fic.
> 
> but then again the alternate title could have been "a fuckton of pretentious metaphors" so take that with what you will.
> 
> basically i love it when janeway and torres talk about things when everyone's sleeping and they just enjoy each other's company and it gives me life

B’elanna sat on the edge of the roof of Academy building D7. Soft, yellow light spilled out of the surrounding dorm rooms. Music blared out of a faraway one, but it was only background noise, the gentle notes spilling out onto the quiet green. The San Francisco chill settled like dust on her pale purple Starfleet uniform shirt, and her jacket laid beside her, but she welcomed the refreshing cold and left her jacket off. A soft breeze tousled her gentle curls and tickled her nose, ruffling the leaves of the trees far below. And up above, millions of stars glittered and twinkled down at her, reminding her where she was. The familiar constellations welcomed her like a mat on the front step reading “home”, but it wasn’t her house. All was quiet, just the way she liked it up here. Nobody else liked the rooftop like she did, and if she had a stack of PADDs about engineering next to her, she might have truly been back. A second chance? She wasn’t sure if she should welcome the idea or cringe.

Her eyes were just closing, lighter than butterfly wings, chest rising and falling with deep, slow breaths of the crisp Bay Area air, when the holodeck doors slid open with a mechanical whoosh, and she was drawn out of her reverie and back to the reality that this was all just photons and forcefields. She turned her head to see none other than Captain Kathryn Janeway with her chin back, drinking in the night sky like it was her usual black coffee, lips parted in wonder. B’elanna wondered if she always looked at the sky like that – like the next adventure, the wondrous unknown and not a battlefield, a gravesite. As the captain slowly made her way across the rooftop to B’elanna, the lieutenant scrambled to her feet, and shoved half her arm into her discarded uniform jacket, sputtering out, “Captain – “ before the captain held up her hand and said with a light laugh, “At ease, Lieutenant.” It seemed that B’elanna would never get used to actually casually with a superior officer.

B’elanna let the jacket fall around her wrist, the other cuff brushing the concrete rooftop. She retracted it and tried to fold it somewhat neatly. “Do you need anything, Captain? Is there a problem in Engineering? I know it’s not my holodeck time, but I – “

The captain smiled, putting her hand on B’elanna’s shoulder. Her fingers tightened, just enough pressure to let her know that the captain was very there, her warmth spreading through the thin fabric of the uniform. “It’s perfectly fine, B’elanna. There’s nothing wrong, I was just coming up here for some relaxation too. But I noticed you were here, and I wanted to make sure you were doing alright. If I’m not mistaken, you have Alpha shift tomorrow morning?”

“As do you.”

“True, true,” Janeway replied with a laugh. Her hand slid off her shoulder, fingertips brushing her shoulder blade like a breath just before a first kiss. She lowered herself into the seat next to B’elanna. “I always liked this place. The rooftop of D7, right?” B’elanna could only nod. She hadn’t expected the captain to be so…casual with her. Or mention her Academy days, even briefly. All the Starfleet captains she’d know had either been uppity, stiff, or trying to kill her – sometimes all three. She drowned the thought that Janeway had once been one of _those_ captains. “It was always so quiet. And I had the loudest roommate in all of my year.”

“I used to study up here.”

“And not to mention the view,” Janeway continued, her voice was barely louder than a whisper, but she was no more than a few feet away, so she could hear her crystal clear. B’elanna turned her eyes from the constellations to look at Janeway, and her heart felt like it was being tugged out of her chest. The light from the stars and the other dorm buildings highlighted her profile, light catching on her eyelashes and smooth forehead. The captain – the confident, self-assured, headstrong captain – looked at the familiar arrangement of stars with longing and hurt. She no longer looked like she’d fight the entire Delta Quadrant singlehandedly, but that she would much rather just lie down and surrender. Her shoulders slumped, but only slightly. Just enough for B’elanna to notice. Her pain pierced B’elanna like a knife. The stars reflected in her blue eyes like lakes on a warm spring day, and god, she’d never realized just how blue her eyes were before and now she was sitting barely inches away, close enough to touch and hold close like she was the only solid thing out here in the unexplored –

“B’elanna?”

She snapped herself out of her daze. “Sorry, I – “ _You were staring, Torres. Goddamn._

Janeway laughed, lightly resting a hand on B’elanna’s shoulder, then quickly removing it. B’elanna found that she missed that, even the brief contact through her uniform, the innocent physical connection with her captain, far too often a distant superior officer. “It’s quite alright, Lieutenant. Maybe you should head back to your quarters, get some rest.”

“If that’s not an order, I’d like to stay here. It’s…calming. Much more calming than sleep.” Janeway nodded, tearing her gaze from Torres and back to the expanse of stars laid out like a story book above them. And maybe she let her eyes linger a second longer than they normally would have. But the woman beside her was intriguing, fascinating, interesting and it was hard to grasp the concept that less than two weeks ago, she would have locked her up in the brig and sent her to prison, much less killed her. In that short amount of time, B’elanna had already become incredibly important to her. Her Chief Engineer; the ship wouldn’t run without her, not now. She had quickly become more than just another former Maquis to Janeway.

Silence stretched and wound around them, intertwining in the empty space between them, the space that was only there because of protocols and regulations. It wrapped around them like an old blanket – there were holes and tears, but it was warm and soft. Maybe they could take shelter here and fight off anybody who tried to come in, build a blanket fort and drink hot coco together and pretend like there’s no Delta Quadrant, no Alpha Quadrant, no Maquis, no Starfleet, no enemies, no friends. The universe could be contained between them, their bodies the outer boundaries for the infinite. That would be all that mattered, everything else would be irrelevant.

Maybe an hour passed, or maybe it was a day, or maybe even an entire year. But time seemed to stand still and stagnant. A pause in the whirlwind of motion. A moment of calm in the storm. Nothing happened – no weapons firing at them, no spacial anomalies, no problems to be solved. It was stiller than the vacuum of space, normally turbulent and chaotic with supernovas and the creation of worlds. But no stars exploded, and no new worlds birthed into existence. Everything simply was, and all that mattered was the captain and the engineer drinking in every last detail of the other and their breath pushing into the space around them and the way their shoulders brushed like passing strangers.

The captain broke the silence first, breaching the space between herself and her chief engineer with a single swift stroke. “Why did you leave Starfleet?” she asked, her voice hardly more than a breath. “Truthfully, this time. Off the record. Not a lieutenant talking to her captain; a friend confessing to a friend.” Her mouth moved of its own accord, and she didn’t know if she’d answer calmly or get up and walk away, but goddamn, it was important to her, how this woman felt and her thoughts. _She_ was important.

B’elanna stared at the ground between her feet, wishing for the force fields to collapse and swallow her into her old dorm room and away from Janeway’s piercing, yet comforting gaze. God, she felt like she was under a tricorder. But she loosened her lips and let her heart work for her tongue.

“It wasn’t the right place for me. I…I just didn’t fit in. I never did, and I won’t now.” She tried to put on her most stubborn, defiant, headstrong face, but her eyes – pools of melted misery and loneliness – gave her away. She bit down, _hard_ , on her bottom lip to keep herself together. She was _always_ the outcast, Starfleet or Maquis. And she hated it.

There was a pause before the captain’s rough, yet soft voice replied, her words trying to reach B’elanna, stretching out to her and inviting her to sit down by the hearth and let the storms outside rage on without them. “Voyager’s not the Academy, B’elanna. We’re far, far away from all of that.” She was trying to sound like that was what she wanted, to be away from the world of Admirals and the Academy, but if you listened closely enough, you could hear the lost, aimless desperation in her voice. The longing, the sharp-edged, pungent longing. As much as B’elanna liked the distance, far away from her mistakes and regrets, she knew that Janeway hated it, and for some reason, that made her hate it too.

B’elanna listened very closely, she listened to the way each syllable came out and how her lips formed each and every word. It resonated inside her, filling her with a strange, foreign feeling. She felt cold and lonely and desperate for the captain to put her hand back on her shoulder and tell her it’ll all be okay. She tried to tell herself she didn’t _need_ that, she’d been through worse without her, but it didn’t quell the urge to sit a little closer.

“You wish you were back, don’t you? You miss it all?”

“Of course I do. I miss my dogs and my fiancé. I miss having the security of what will happen tomorrow. I miss a lot of things about Earth, but there’s a lot I don’t miss that I didn’t even realize I wouldn’t mind getting away from. There’s freedom out here. It’s dangerous and nerve-wracking, but I feel more free than I’ve felt in a long time.” She looked back to the sparkling stars and carefully kept her eyes away from the engineer beside her, as if looking at her too much might hurt her. She _couldn’t_ look at her, knowing what they’d mean to each other back there; maybe that fact played a part in her thoughts about the Alpha Quadrant, maybe it was nothing, but maybe it was everything. She used to call that place home, she spent all her life until a few weeks ago there, but now it seemed like it wasn’t even in the same universe, a foreign land she’d visited briefly in a dream. “I’ve gotten to know some people I wouldn’t have back on Earth. We’ve lost people, but we’ve gained others. I know I should feel like I want to go home, but I don’t know how I _actually_ feel. Do I want to run home with my tail in between my legs, or explore the unknown? B’elanna, I’m a lot more reckless then you might pin a Starfleet captain to be, and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad.” She slumped forward, resting her elbow on her thigh and her chin on her hand. She had the face of a warrior walking into her final battle.

B’elanna bit her lip, before letting the words slip out, sly and covert: “You would have made a good Maquis.”

Janeway turned to her, sitting up a little straighter, an eyebrow raised. “Why do you say that?”

“Well, if you weren’t so loyal to Starfleet. But you’re a fighter. You’re not afraid of a challenge, you look them in the eye and say, ‘No way.’ If there’s no obvious choice, you make your own. You’re right – you’re not what I expected a Starfleet captain to be.”

“Did you like it, B’elanna? Did you like fighting for your life, fighting against ruthless killers? Did you like not knowing what tomorrow would hold? Did you like watching your friends die?”

“Of course I didn’t.” B’elanna closed her eyes, tightly, trying to block out the harsh, burning light. “I hated all that. But that’s not all there was to the Maquis. I did something. Have you ever seen a child’s face when you free her from prison, and she comes up and hugs you like you’re a—a god or something? Have you ever felt like whatever you were doing was important? Have you ever had people to support you in everything? That’s what made me happy about the Maquis.”

“And then you get stuck out here.”

“We’re all stuck out here.”

“B’elanna?”

“Yes, Captain?”

“You’re not alone out here. There’s a hundred and forty other crewmembers, too. Don’t isolate yourself.”

“Captain?”

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“You should take your own advice sometimes.”


End file.
